CCBot helps you monitor and manage your database Infrastructure from Slack. ChatOps is about bringing your DevOps work to your chats and conversations within a team, e.g. Slack. You can deploy database clusters, get status information, trigger backups, add nodes to your cluster or replication setup by talking to a chatbot, which understands ClusterControl commands.

How can you quickly evaluate performance of a database under intensive load? Welcome to sysbench. This blog gives you a good background of sysbench, and how you can use it to benchmark MySQL and MariaDB.

Split brain syndrome is a state where a cluster of nodes is partitioned into smaller clusters of equal numbers of nodes, and each cluster believes it is the active cluster. This is a harmful state, as data is changed on a partition, without being replicated to the other. This blog post describes how to prevent a split brain from happening, and what can be done if it does happen.

So now that you have your databases up and running and highly available, how do you ensure that you have backups of your data? You can use backups for multiple things: disaster recovery, to provide production data to test against development or even to provision a slave node. This last case is already covered by ClusterControl. When you add a new (replica) node to your replication setup, ClusterControl will make a backup/snapshot of the master node and use it to build the replica.

Performing regular database backups is imperative for any production system. Usually when MySQL data gets corrupted, the recommendation is to restore it from the last backup, switch to DR server or take down the affected node down, if you have a cluster, to serve data immediately from other nodes. In some cases you can't - if the backup is not there, the cluster was never set up, your replication is down for a very long time, or the DR procedure was never tested.

As more companies run their workloads in the cloud, cloud database services are increasingly being used manage data. Database services from the leading vendors share many similarities, but they have their own characteristics that may make them well-, or ill-suited to your workload. In this article, we are going to compare the database services from two of the leading cloud vendors - Google Cloud SQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL.

Watch Part 2 of our database high availability webinar special. In this session we focus on how to measure database availability. It is notoriously hard to measure and report on, although it is an important KPI in any SLA between you and your customers. We discuss the different factors that affect database availability and see how one can measure database availability in a realistic way.